Several weeks ago Joe Breda, President of Bloomberg Law sent a communication to Bloomberg Law customers promising a new pricing strategy. Here in the key text from the document:

“Our migration to a single platform has meant price adjustments for some customers. In response, we are recommitting to transparency and predictability in pricing.  Our long-term vision is a fair price that’s consistent with the marketplace and representative of the value Bloomberg Law brings to your practice or business.” (The complete message is included at the bottom of this post.)

I had a conversation with Breda in which he explained that although Bloomberg will no longer sell Practice Centers, customers can get access to practice related content by purchasing  as many seats as are required by any practice
Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Returns to Predictable Pricing Model – Enhances Customer Cost Management

“The age of analytics and algorithms is upon us. A new and important role is emerging for information professionals. They will help lawyers ask new questions and gain new insights using analytics. ”

Read my analysis of this trend in the November/December 2017 issue of AALL Spectrum. Click here to read Analytics and Insights:

In late September Bloomberg Law announced several new research features which leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to accelerate case law research.  The The new “Points of Law”  feature allows attorneys to quickly find language critical to a court’s reasoning to support their legal arguments . This feature was immediately available to all current subscibers to Bloomberg Law at no additional cost.

The Bloomberg Law platform now features one million points of law and is updated throughout the day. “Points of law” results are generated by the application of machine learning to the Blaw database of 13 million published and unpublished state and federal court opinions. Researchers can either start  there research with a point of law or start with a keyword then sort by relevance or most cited.

Bloomberg Law Points of Law

This new feature was created is response to the market demand for workflow enhancing tools. “Points of law” research results highlight the relevant language in each opinion. The press release describes the benefit as “enabling attorneys to
Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Launches AI Enabled Research Features: Points of Law and Citation Maps

Today Bloomberg Law is announcing the release of its 15th practice center which is focused on E-Discovery. Bloomberg is  moving rapidly to consolidate existing BNA news, practice  and analytical resources as well as creating new content to enhance attorneys workflow efficiency. The Bloomberg Law Practice Centers are designed to compete directly with competitors in this space: Thomson Reuters Practical Law and Lexis Practice Advisor.

Bloomberg Law E Discovery Practice Center

The E Discovery Practice Center offers a comprehensive solution that integrates news, primary sources including both published and unpublished state and federal court opinions, tools, sample forms, and expert guidance.  The press release indicates that this is the only resource of its kind available on an integrated legal research and business intelligence platform. The E-Discovery Practice Center will be available to all Bloomberg Law subscribers at no additional cost.

The practice center’s home page features high value content including a curated collection of fully searchable state and federal court opinions, state-specific discovery guidance and rules, and BNA’s E-Discovery Portfolio series.  I don’t recall seeing a collection of state ediscovery rules in any other product. Since ediscovery touches on a wide range of complex issues, the E-Discovery Center links to other BloombergBNA materials in related disciplines. Including: cross-border data transfers, government and internal investigations, and data and privacy security. 
Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Launches 15th Practice Center: E-Discovery

As market power shifts from law firms to in-house counsel, Bloomberg Law has responded by bulking up the Corporate Practice Center with resources designed to address the special needs of Chief Legal Officers, Chief Compliance Officers and Chief Operating Officers.  Earlier this year Bloomberg Law relaunched the Corporate Practice Center with materials developed with extensive input from corporate counsel at major U.S. Companies. The Corporate Practice at Center  includes  practice pages covering: compliance, legal operations, corporate governance,  alternative business structures, litigation and corporate news. In addition an “In Focus, “hot topics” section offers deep coverage of special topics such as proxy regulation and FCPA.

Bloomberg and the Association for Corporate Counsel (ACC) also announced that they had entered a  strategic collaboration for Bloomberg Law to offer sponsored content, practice tools and editorial expertise to ACC members through professional enrichment, educational and development programs.Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Relaunches Corporate Practice Center with In-House Counsel Focus: Compliance, Toolkits and Analytics

Entering the “no hyperbole” zone. No Robots in Sight
I spent almost an hour last Friday talking to Jeff Pfeifer, Vice President of Product Management at Lexis Nexis about the upcoming release of a new artificial intelligence enabled Lexis Advance feature called Lexis Answers. Instead of the “robot lawyer” hyperbole that has characterized many recent AI product announcements, Pfeiffer while enthusiastic for Lexis Answers, is refreshingly restrained in discussing the product. Most importantly he does not oversimplify the true complexity of legal research when applying AI to a specific set of facts. Pfiefer describes Lexis Answers as getting lawyers to a “well informed starting point,” speeding up basic research so lawyers can start more complex research. He sees Lexis Answers the “next evolutionary step in a journey with big data sets which is moving towards human like interactions with machines using standard Dialog.”

Press releaseLexis® Answers, a new artificial intelligence (A.I.) enhancement within its flagship Lexis Advance® offering. Using powerful machine learning, cognitive computing and advanced natural language processing technologies, Lexis Answers transforms legal research by understanding the user’s natural language question and delivering the clearest, most concise and authoritative answer, in addition to finely tuned, comprehensive search results.Learning is based on a universe of 14 million case law opinions.Continue Reading Lexis Answers: Artificial Intelligence Without the Hyperbole; No Robot Lawyers In Sight–A Fastrack to Legal Answers

Wolters Kluwer must be offering free double espresso shots every morning to their product developers and editors. Do they even sleep these days?  Less than a month ago I wrote a post on the release of their Cybersecurity & Privacy platform … the relaunch of their  International Arbitration platform and their alliance with  IP analytics provider ktMine. Today they are announcing the release of  “Corporate SmartTasks” which follows on their May 18th  launch of a free Federal Regulatory Knowledge Center beta site.

 WKfederalcomparison
The Wolters Kluwer SmartTask Corporate Suite

Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Leaps to the Head of the Class with “SmartTasks” Customizable Corporate Know-How and Offers a Free Federal Legislative Knowledge Center

The members of the Columbia Law Revue –   these law students are not only smart, but they are also clever  and some of them sing like Broadway headliners. Maybe we should invite them to perform at the American Association of Law Libraries Conference this summer.   This is the best legal research video since Craig Runde and Bill Lindberg

In December I offered readers the opportunity to respond to the 2016 Start/Stop Poll in which they could vote for the best new products and features and highlight the products that they planned to say good-bye to. The results of the process part of the survey are posted here.For the second year in a